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As I commented at the time “This was ironic because just before
the Fed hiked its interest rate, the figures for US industrial
production in November came up and they showed the worst fall since
December 2009 at the end of the Great Recession.” Since then we
have had further poor data on the US economy with weak retail sales and
industrial production for December, suggesting that US real GDP growth
in the last quarter of 2015 was likely to be as low as just 1%.

The first was to ignore the fact of the weak global and US economic
recovery or argue that it didn’t matter. At the main debate on the
issue among leading luminaries of the mainstream, Martin Feldstein,
former economics advisor to Bush, reckoned that the US economy was
recovering well with unemployment down and incomes rising. So there was
nothing to worry about.

John Taylor, leading economist from Stanford University, took a
different tack. Yes, the US economy was very weak but this was the
fault of economic and monetary policies of the current US administration
and the Federal Reserve. What was needed was to reduce
regulation of the banks and large companies so they can grow and for the
Fed to end its cheap money policy. Let’s just get back to business as
usual and things will be fine. Taylor appeared oblivious to the fact
that it was the failure to regulate the banks and financial system or to
stop the introduction of speculative financial instruments that
contributed to the global financial crash in the first place!

But the main response of the other debaters at the mainstream meeting
was to conclude that we just don’t know why the economic recovery was
so weak and now seems to be faltering. Vice chair of the Fed, Stanley Fischer, offered several possible reasons, but said he did not know which was right. Fischer
was worried that the ‘equilibrium rate of interest’, (now called R*)
where savings and investment are matched with full employment and
moderate inflation looked very low, as inflation was near zero. This
was another way of saying that the equilibrium rate could be ‘zero
bound’ and thus the economy was in some form of ‘secular stagnation’, as
argued by Keynesians like Larry Summers.

But Olivier Blanchard, former chief economist of the IMF,
ever the optimist, offered Fischer a positive answer. Actually, the US
economic recovery was beginning to look normal, after all. You see,
the infamous Phillips curve of the 1970s, namely that when unemployment
fell, inflation would rise, was still operating weakly. So as labour
markets tightened, inflation would rise and the Fed would be justified
in raising its policy rate as it had started to do.

I’ve discussed before this ‘equilibrium rate of interest’ idea (drawn from the work of neoclassical monetarist, Knut Wicksell).
Both Keynes and Marx looked, not to a concept of a ‘natural rate of
interest’ but to the relation between the interest rate for holding or
lending money to the profitability (or return) on productive capital.
Indeed, so did Wicksell. According to Wicksell, the natural rate is
“never high or low in itself, but only in relation to the profit which
people can make with the money in their hands, and this, of course,
varies. In good times, when trade is brisk, the rate of profit is high,
and, what is of great consequence, is generally expected to remain high;
in periods of depression it is low, and expected to remain low.” But
there was no mention of this relation between R* and the profitability
of capital from the likes of Fischer or Blanchard at ASSA.

Another view is that of Austrian school of economics that argues that
the easy money policy of the Fed and other central banks, including the
use of quantitative easing (QE), i.e. ‘printing money’, has only
fuelled the stock market and bond boom that is now bursting and
distorted the allocation of investment into productive sectors. This
malinvestment must be quashed with a strong dose of monetary tightening
to get interest back into line with the Wicksellian ‘natural
equilibrium’.

This Austrian view has been promoted by the economists of the
international central bankers association, the Bank of International
Settlements (BIS). The BIS economists reject the Keynesian view of
‘secular stagnation’ that must be overcome by more monetary and fiscal
stimulus. That is just making things worse, in their view. They have
done several studies to argue that what causes crises is excessive
credit leading to malinvestment and financial bubbles that burst. Their latest study of recessions in 22 rich countries dating back to the late 1960s claims just this.
It’s not a lack of demand that ‘causes’ economic crises under
capitalism as Keynesians like Paul Krugman, Larry Summers or Brad DeLong
argue, but malinvestment in the supply-side of the economy caused by
too much debt.

Returning to Wicksell, the BIS economists reckon that if real
interest rates (that’s after inflation is deducted) are held too low
(i.e. below the ‘natural rate’ that equates savings and investment in
the ‘real economy’), then credit bubbles and malinvestment ensue. And
rates are too low. They are way into negative territory, not seen since
the first post-war international slump of 1974-5.

The BIS reckons the Fed is right to hike interest rates, but what is
wrong is that they have taken too long to do so. Now the economy will
have to go through ‘cold turkey’ or ‘creative destruction’ (to use the
phrase of early 20th century Austrian economist, Joseph
Schumpeter) to clear the system of excessive credit and unproductive
investment. In other words, another slump.

In a way, nothing has changed in the debates of the 1930s between
the Keynesians who blame a lack of demand for the depression (with no
real explanation of why demand slumped) and the Austerians (Austrians
and monetarists like Milton Friedman) who blame excessive credit and the
interference of central banks and governments in the ‘natural’ workings
of the market.

Once again I have to trot out my hobby-horse on the debate within
mainstream economics on whether the cause of the Great Recession and
subsequent depression can be laid at the door of the lack of demand
(Keynesian) or too much debt (Austrian). Neither theory has a place for
the profitability of capital in an economy that yet has a mode for
production based on making a profit!

Yes, in a slump, there is a lack of demand (capitalists cut
investment and households stop spending). But that is a description of a
slump, not an explanation. Yes, too much debt can provoke a financial
crisis and weigh down on future investment. But why and when does debt
or credit, a necessary part of capital accumulation, become ‘too much’?

The Marxist answer, in my view, is that debt becomes too much when it
can no longer be serviced because the profits from productive
investment become insufficient to sustain it. And demand becomes
inadequate when the profits from investment drop so much that capital
stops employing labour and closes down companies and reduces the
utilisation of plant and equipment.

These RBC theorists reckoned that low
interest rates were not an indicator that the US economy was in
stagnation and so hiking them would not cause a new recession. Don’t
look at interest rates, they said, look at the profitability of
corporate capital. That is what matters. And that is at its highest
for 30 years.

“While many authors have documented the low and declining returns
on government debt, these returns bear little resemblance to the
returns on productive capital: The latter is a direct measure and a much
better indicator of adequate private investment opportunities and has
been rising for the past five years. Summers (2014) and others have
articulated the secular stagnation hypothesis based on insufficient
aggregate demand: The evidence on investment strongly suggests
otherwise. Indeed, the private sector has undertaken large capital
outlays since the end of the recession. The takeaway here is that the
current recovery is not an example of secular stagnation. The evidence
on investment and returns on productive capital shatter the essential
components of the secular stagnation hypothesis.”
In my view, the RBC theorists are right that “the returns on
productive capital” are a much better indicator of the state of the
economy than interest rates and the unproductive debate on what is the
right rate of interest. But they are wrong in arguing that all is fine
because profitability has never been higher. As
this blog and other Marxist authors have shown, US and global
profitability is not at its highest but near its lows since 1945. And this is especially the case with the profitability of productive assets (ie excluding finance and real estate).

Yes, there was a recovery of profitability in the neo-liberal period
after the early 1980s, but it was limited and came to an end by the end
of century. The last 15 years or so has been a profitability downwave
(with short rallies). It is because of this downwave (and excessive debt that has accompanied it) that
capitalism has failed to get out of the long depression. The current
stock market collapse is an indicator of this and perhaps heralds the
next leg down in the global economy, whether the Fed hikes again in 2016
or not.